I has new lens, yay.
Ordered slightly before my own personal financial crisis became apparent, my new lens arrived yesterday. As some here know I shoot with Olympus and the new lens is from Olympus's "Budget" series (meaning not weather sealed and cheaper than the others, tho this one is definitely the most expensive budget lens in their lineup). At a focal length range of 9-18mm (equiv 18-36mm) this is an ultra wide angle lens.
Here's some fun I had with it yesterday in the center of antwerp:
This is a tricky little lens, not least because I've never shot wider than 27mm equiv and I have to learn all the caveats of UWA on the fly (and there are plenty, from perspective to very tricky lighting).
With this new lens, my kit is now extremely flexible and usable for nearly any picture. My entire kit is (multiply by 2 to get equivalent focal lengths):
- 9-18mm F/4-5.6 Ultra-wide angle zoom.
- 14-42mm F/3.5-5.6 Standard zoom kit lens. A nice and lightweight (220gr) carry-around lens.
- 40-150mm F/3.5-5.6 Tele zoom kit lens.
- 50mm F/2.0 Macro Very sharp portrait/macro/low-light lens. My favourite.
- 135-400mm F/4-5.6 Ultra-tele lens. Slightly too heavy and soft for my tastes, but served me well in africa and I like long teles.
- FL-36 Flash Guide number 36, rotates around two axis.
- Hyperdrive SPACE 250 Gb Photo storage unit
- GPS Data logger Lets me sync pictures wth location data
- Several extra batteries
- 58mm and 52mm circular polarizer
The entire kit fits in my camera bag (it's a big bag I admit) and weighs less than three kg (most of that weight is the ultra-tele). It spans 35mm-equivalent focal ranges of 18 to 800 (making it 44X optical zoom) and has everything for indoors, outdoors, macro, portrait etc etc. I'm pretty proud of this kit :)
Right now I have no concrete plans to expand it. Any more lenses now would almost certainly be to replace one I already have. In that aspect I'm drawn towards the 12-60mm standard grade lens to replace my budget 14-42mm (the former is a very good lens optically, and much praised by anybody who's used it) or the 70-300mm budget lens to replace the 135-400mm sigma I have (the former weighs less than half as much and is considerably sharper) but with current finances neither will be happening soon.
Comments
matter, your web site came up, it seems to be great.
I've bookmarked it in my google bookmarks.